Memorias, 2011

Camilo Ontiveros - Los Angeles, USA

Installation

This project stages a large scale vigil that invites the audience to light a candle in commemoration of the lost lives of Ontario-based migrant workers. Alongside posters, this initiative reaches out to the individual passersby as well as community organizations that represent the interests of labour workers.

On Yonge Street, such an act creates a spectacle of light that positions the individual to consider the movement between the invisible systems of global finance and its impact on immigration, labour and the formation of communities that characterize Toronto's diverse population. With a focus on the human migration patterns structured by the results of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), this participatory installation lights up the often unseen dimension of human labour and its life cycle within the economic system.

This work is part of the artist's broader questioning of the cyclical reproduction of human and material labour within trans-national economies, as well as the shifts in the use and exchange values of the object/subject of production.

Collaborating organizations; Mayworks Festival, Latin American Canadian Art Projects, Maquila Solidarity Network, Red Tree Collective, Toronto Free Gallery and the United Food and Commercial Workers Union.

Camilo Ontiveros (b. 1978, Mexico) received an MFA from UCLA in 2009, and has recently been awarded the Illy Prize at ARCO Madrid, Spain's international exhibition of contemporary art. His practice is focused upon issues of inter-national economic relations made manifest through the migration of people and communities between the Americas.

Parental guidance advised